Hazel Wolf, 101; Fought for the Environment

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

Published: January 24, 2000

Hazel Wolf, an ardent environmentalist whose life spanned the 20th century and whose causes encompassed the era's social turmoil, died in Port Angeles, Wash., on Wednesday. She was 101 and lived in Seattle.

Since the early 1960's Ms. Wolf was a leader in the Audubon Society, serving as secretary of the Seattle chapter for 37 years and helping to establish 21 of the 26 Audubon chapters in Washington. She was also active in the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs, as its one-time president and as editor of its newsletter until her death.

Born in the 19th century, Ms. Wolf had long spoken of wanting to witness the 21st. She told the oral historian Studs Terkel, who profiled her in his 1995 book ''Coming of Age,'' that she intended to live until the year 2000. ''Then I'm going,'' she said.

Especially in the Seattle region, but also beyond, she was elder stateswoman in a community of intersecting social causes, recognized by the Association of Biologists and Ecologists of Nicaragua for conservation work there, by the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility with their Paul Beeson Peace Award, by the National Audubon Society with its medal of excellence and last year by Seattle with its Spirit of America Award.

But long before the environmental movement blossomed, providing a cause that made her celebrated in her later years, Ms. Wolf was steeped in struggles over human rights, communism, labor issues, peace, feminism and immigration.

Hazel Anna Cummings Anderson was born on March 10, 1898, in Victoria, British Columbia. Her father was Canadian and her mother was American. After separating from her first husband, Edward Dalziel, she moved to the United States in 1923 with her daughter, finding work as a legal secretary, her lifelong career.

She joined the Communist Party during the Depression, attracted by its support for social welfare programs like food subsidies, unemployment aid and social security.

Her first party meeting, she recalled in a speech years later, was at a home where the local sheriff was at that moment trying to evict a family. ''I joined in what was occurring,'' she said. ''As the sheriff's men brought the furniture out to pile it on the sidewalk, the rest of us picked it up and took it into the house by the back door. This went on for quite a while until the sheriff and his men, who were not very enthusiastic in the first place, left in despair and frustration.''

Ms. Wolf said she lost interest in the party during World War II, as the wartime boom made issues of economic security less compelling to her. But years after she left the party, the government tried to expel her, starting a personal and legal struggle that shaped her life. That fight lasted 15 years, as McCarthyism rose and fell. She once joked that a lawyer she worked for at the time spent so much effort on her case that it was not clear who was working for whom.

The experience led her into advocacy for the rights of immigrants, a cause she never gave up. ''The foreign born were the earliest victims of the McCarthy witch hunt,'' she said 10 years ago in a talk to a high school class. ''They still have a hard and uncertain life.''

In that lecture, as on many other occasions, Ms. Wolf recounted being thrown in jail briefly in 1958, charged with sedition though she had left the Communist Party 13 years before. She told the two other women in her jail cell that she had been accused of conspiring to overthrow the government by violent means. ''What a wonderful idea,'' one of her fellow prisoners said.

''I never did try to overthrow the government, or if I did, I didn't do a very good job,'' Ms. Wolf said.

But her associates said she never gave up trying to overthrow whatever she saw as unjust, whether it was the behavior of big corporations or the policies of the United States in Nicaragua. Her reputation grew, and she became a frequent public speaker (many of her speeches can be found on the World Wide Web at members.tripod.com/HazelWolf). Only a broken hip prevented her from joining the protests by unions and environmentalists in Seattle during the recent meeting of the World Trade Organization, said Brock Evans, president of the Western Outdoor Clubs.

''One of her major causes was always for labor to join with environmentalists,'' he said. Another was for environmentalists to include Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups in their movement.

''People gang up to protect all kinds of things -- civil liberties, freedom of speech,'' Ms. Wolf once wrote. ''It's in our genes to gang up. Anytime we want anything, we gang up.''

Summing up her many causes, she told the American Immigration Lawyers Association last year, ''We lost most of the battles but we won the war in all of them.''

She told them insouciantly that when she finally became an American citizen in 1974, after taking the oath and forswearing allegiance to foreign potentates, she went to a bar to celebrate with friends. ''I proposed the following toast: 'To hell with Queen Elizabeth and to hell with Richard Nixon, too.' ''

She is survived by her daughter, Nydia Levick of Port Angeles, five grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren. Her second marriage, to Herbert Wolf, also ended in divorce.

Ms. Wolf was already at most people's retirement age when a friend persuaded her to join the Audubon Society in the early 1960's. It was the era when Rachel Carson was warning that pesticides and the eradication of habitats were threatening the earth with a silent spring with no song birds, but more than that book or her friend's arm-twisting, it was bird-watching (specifically, observing a brown creeper grubbing in the woods) that sparked her deep involvement with Audubon. For decades more, she continued to go to the woods for inspiration and to urge others along the environmental path.

But she spiced her advocacy with a dollop of salt. In a speech last year on saving the endangered salmon of the Pacific Northwest, she reminded her Seattle University audience of the first reason to do so: the fish are ''good to eat.''

And in a speech on sustainable forestry practices in 1998, she said her goal was not, as she quoted the poet, to ''spare that tree, cut not a single bough,'' but rather to make sure there would always be forests for wild creatures and to provide homes, furniture, paper and ''probably even skateboards.''

Photo: Hazel Wolf was honored in January 1999 during the State of the State address of Gov. Gary Locke of Washington. (Associated Press)